Hayao Miyazaki's critically-acclaimed Spirited Away was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature and won a surprisingly large audience in America given how poorly foreign-made films traditionally do there.  The magical tale of a little girl becoming caught up in a world of monsters and witches won rave reviews from seemingly all who saw it.  It seemed to capture the audience's attention in a way that most Hollywood animation - with the exception of the Pixar studio's output - singularly fails to do these days.  Japanese Composer Joe Hisaishi earned an element of fame in the film music community for Miyazaki's previous movie Princess Mononoke and seemed to go from strength to strength with this follow-up.

The most immediately striking thing about the album - released by Milan - is how distinctly un-Japanese it is.  The opening piano theme could easily come from the latest Hollywood romantic comedy, in fact.  But Hisaishi develops the music into something really quite magical.  Whereas all but the best Hollywood film composers fall into various predictable cliches when scoring animations, Hisaishi doesn't treat Spirited Away as an amination, he just treats it as a film, and I'm not sure why more composers don't do that.  When they do - Finding Nemo, Mulan, Heavy Metal - the results tend to be outstanding, especially if the film is a good one.

Hisaishi's music has an eternal, child-like quality without actually being childish.  It's like a wistful, sentimental, romantic portrait of childhood innocence - not of an adult's view of children, which is how most composers would have done it, but of a child's view of adults.  Parts of it really do sound like they belong in a 1940s Max Steiner score.

There are so many positives about the music and so much for Hisaishi to be applauded over that it seems a shame to point out the negatives, but there are some.  For one thing, despite everything that is good about the composer's approach to the material, parts of it are just a little generic and the themes don't stick long in the memory.  Also, some of the sequences which are dominated by (live) percussion aren't especially interesting and could maybe have been left off.  Finally, the Japanese song "Always With Me" is rather too weird to be taken seriously.  There always seems to be something vaguely freaky about Japanese pop music, and this is no exception.

By and large, however, this one's a winner.

Buy this CD by clicking here!

Tracks